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Your 15 hours of Lame

Standing in line at the feeding trough of self-involvement … The Soap Opera of the Damned.

Reality TV.

What an immense festering crock of shit.

I guess MTV’s “Real World” show started the craze. Get half a dozen punks with more lifestyle issues than brains, jam them into a house fit for Puff Daddy, set up a few external stimuli to create conflict, and then sit back and watch the emotional carnage. And at first there was something more than the novelty of it all. To actually see people’s lives unfold in front of you was kind of interesting. Kind of like what a soap opera would be like if Jerry Springer directed it. And wrote it. And cast it.

And then came Survivor. Big network TV. Big ratings. Big money. And, again, it was interesting at first. By the second time around you pretty much knew the formula. And watching normal people crap in the woods and eat bark just can’t hold an audience that long.

It seems that Hollywood and Madison Avenue have bought into the concept of reality TV in a big way. And why not? No expensive actors to pay – any prize money pales in comparison to actually paying people. No expensive sets or crews are needed as most of what goes on is either from quasi-hidden cameras in the “house” or done with hand-helds. Writers? Nope. And if one of these ideas bombs – so what?

The bevy of shows spawned from the seeds of Survivor include all the “marry a millionaire” shows, the home fix-up competition shows, the real-people-doing-stunts shows, and the perversions on the theme committed by the music channels who started the whole mess.

Every one claims to have the “ultimate” reality show.

But there’s really one big problem that the networks are missing.

None of the people they put on the air are interesting. Half of them wouldn’t even be worth grinding up into hamburger. Many are so self-absorbed that you have to wonder how light manages to reflect off them into the camera lens – instead of getting sucked into their own personal vortex of self-adulation.

The people who make for good drama, conflict, tantrums, aberrant sexual antics, drug addiction, overall cluelessness, and shockingly poor decision making are about as dull and pathetic a bunch of losers as you’d expect.

And they’re not just getting the fabled “15 minutes of fame.” They’re getting hours and hours of it. Which is much more pathetic than it would otherwise seem. Usually someone gets interviewed for doing something or experiencing something of worth. But these hopeless wanker’s only accomplishment is that they wanted to be on TV, and by ridding themselves of any and all dignity, managed to get their sorry asses on the tube.

“But they passed the audition,” you might retort. But consider the character and cognitive traits one must need to display to get on some of these shows. It’s more like reverse Darwinism.

Yes!

Wizard!

Our brilliant media has found a way to not just identify the most pathetic examples of Americana, but also isolate and display them for everyone’s grotesque pleasure. A human traffic accident seemingly without end, which the public can rubber-neck at for as long as it holds ratings.